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My college mathematics class was my first time actually understanding algebra. I am also fascinated by the way that business situations can be represented as lines on a graph, even though I don’t understand graphing very well. Although this has been my hardest course and the lowest grade of any course in Full Sail, I am glad I am finally overcoming my greatest academic weakness. On arithmetic, I am solid, but all of the other subjects are quite new to me.

I will also have the PDF textbook to review even when the class ends so I can have a better idea about these subjects. I simply haven’t had time to look at it because I am gone 11 to 12 hours out of the day, trying to get some sleep and then working on school. It’s a miracle I can get anything done with my insane life!

But I also know that as long as I work a full-time job, I will not have the time to learn as well as I could have if school was the only thing going on. I try to cram and do everything on Thursday and Saturday, which are my nights off.

In any case, I am proud of myself for trying to continue my education even though I didn’t start college until one month before my 36th birthday. Yeah, I’ll be in debt trying to pay off my student loans for the rest of my life, but at least this was a decision I made.

Some much younger people go to college when they are 18 or in their early 20s because they are told they have to. I don’t think that someone should automatically pursue higher education unless they have a good reason for it and goals they think it will help with.

But the math class, which is only one class of many, is actually my favorite because I know that with math, there is a right answer even if I can’t find it. It lacks the subjective, opinionated nature of all the other subjects.

In fact, math class is like playing chess. I may have lost the game, but I enjoyed the process of trying to find the right moves. At least I know the rules and can identify what went wrong, even if it is after the fact.

In case you haven’t heard, I am making a chess game. It’s not complete but most of the pieces move correctly. I still need to work on the pawn rules. However, I have an example of the two move checkmate called the Fool’s Mate.

In this chess game, all pieces are represented by letters. It’s not too hard to figure out which is which if you are familiar with chess notation.

This program is not meant to compete with existing ways to play chess. Most notably chess.com and lichess.org are the best websites to play chess against other people. This program is more for me to make videos explaining chess openings and also show off my programming skills.

I made up a two-part word that has a meaning that makes sense.

quiz jockey

A jockey is someone competitive in sports. Usually, it refers to a horse jockey(though the horse does all the work). People have also used the word disc jockey. Often this is shortened to jock, which is a term for an athlete.

However, if competitive sports were solving quizzes, then a quiz jockey would be a real thing. This word is not allowed in words with friends as far as I am aware, but if it were, it would be the highest-scoring 10-letter word. If made plural, then quiz jockeys would be the highest-scoring 11-letter word!

Words with Friends accepts quizmaster as a compound word of quiz and master. If the same reasoning were applied, this word I invented, “quizjockey”, would definitely be the best word to ever exist for points.

What I am about to show you is nothing short of amazing. The method used to combine the XOR checkerboard is theoretically simple, but implementing it in code is not!

First, you should see the original Progress Flag image I designed in Inkscape:

Then you can look at how it is when the XOR checkerboard is drawn on top of it. This inverts the colors where the pattern covers it.

This was achieved by use of direct pixel access on an SDL surface using my own custom checkerboard drawing function. A lot of error checking went into it! But all the work was worth it because now I have something beautiful beyond comprehension!

A Panoramic View of All T-spins